Source note: Local copy of a Summer Into AI 2026 submission originally published on Substack. Screenshots, video, and audio found in the post body are mirrored locally when publicly accessible; profile and avatar images are intentionally not copied. Read the canonical post.
Insert Coin, Uncle Sam
A mashup of three “Summer into AI” entries, and why it exists
This week’s contest theme was simple: dig up boring federal data nobody ever turned into anything, and turn it into something. Three entries did exactly that, in three completely different directions. This piece is what happens when you smash all three into one arcade cabinet.
The three cartridges
Cartridge one is Eric’s data.PUNK — CDC life expectancy and death-rate data, reimagined as a Little Richard-style platformer. Punk rock, mortality statistics, and a punchline built right in: no music included.
Cartridge two is Ride for Liberty, built by Jake Strait and reviewed by Eric in his Saturday Plays column. A three-lane rocket ride crashing through fireworks and beer kegs, themed “Red, White, Boom” for the week’s patriotic prompt.
Cartridge three is Myles’s White Nose — thirteen winters of USGS bat-plague surveillance data, county by county, animated into a map you can actually watch spread. The most quietly devastating of the three: a real epidemic, fully documented by the federal government, that nobody had ever bothered to visualize until now.
What connects them
On the surface, a punk-rock health chart, a fireworks rocket ride, and a bat plague map don’t have much in common. But look at the shape of each project and the pattern is identical: someone found a dataset the government collected and then abandoned, and gave it a pulse. Different genres, same move.
That’s the “cheat code” this mashup is built around — the idea that data.PUNK, Ride for Liberty, and White Nose aren’t really three separate entries so much as three difficulty settings on the same game.
Why an arcade cabinet
The contest itself already leans into an arcade, remix-culture spirit — Eric’s Saturday Plays column exists specifically to play and dissect other people’s submissions, treating each week’s entries like cartridges in a shared machine. Building a literal arcade cabinet — with all three cartridges bursting out of the coin slot, connected by string-light wiring spelling out “SUMMER INTO AI” — just makes that metaphor visible instead of implied.
The eagle-with-guitar, eagle-in-a-rocket, and bat-in-a-lab-coat details are there because the brief for this piece was “fun, playful, and slightly bizarre.” A punk-rock bald eagle felt like the right connective tissue across three otherwise unrelated dataset stories — equal parts patriotic and unhinged, which is more or less the spirit the whole contest runs on.
Credit where it’s due
data.PUNK — Eric, advisoryhour.substack.com
Ride for Liberty — built by Jake Strait, reviewed by Eric, advisoryhour.substack.com
White Nose — Myles, merlinforge.substack.com
This piece is a remix built on top of their work for this week’s combination challenge — go read the originals, especially the White Nose map. It’s the real thing.
Here ya go, Eric
Original source
Canonical Substack URL: https://xblueundertow.substack.com/p/insert-coin-uncle-sam.